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A Queer Atheist In the Heart of Mormon Country

By Chris Stedman

…d became more aware. Only two percent said that they changed their minds because they came to believe that gay people are “born that way.” Visibility and education matter, but positive relationships across lines of difference seem to matter even more. Whether we are in agreement or not, conversation is greatly needed. The kind of tribalism that causes people to be suspicious of those they think are not like them will be overcome through relationsh…

The Threat to Democracy Runs Deep, But Mathematics Could Address the Abominable State of Representation and Voting

By Ismar Volić

…ted agenda that results is carried out to the dissatisfaction of most Americans. Fanatical bases gather under banners of intolerance and exclusion while vast swaths of the population feel disenfranchised and removed from the political process. The connection between an ordinary citizen and the government that purportedly acts on their mandate has never been stretched this thin. Underpinning all this is a failure of mechanisms that run our democrac…

Supreme Court Rules Religion is Special… This Time

By Katherine Stewart

…ndicates that it is. That may be the one thing that they got right in this case. The U.S. has on the books a number of valuable laws against discrimination in the workplace, and all organizations (businesses, nonprofits, schools, governments) are expected to abide by these laws. Except religions, or so it now seems. According to the Tabor ruling, religious groups get a pass on the law when it comes to employees who are considered “ministerial.” Th…

Speaking with Palestinian-American Republican Who Confronted GOP at Debate

By Haroon Moghul

…mong the Palestinian population is about the same as the percentage of African Americans in the U.S.A. For a party so concerned with America’s Christian identity, Romney and Gingrich’s dismissal of the Palestinians is part of their broader disinterest in the Muslim world, and its diversities and differences. Namely, most Muslims aren’t Arabs, and most Arab Americans are Christians. You read that correctly. This is important because it’s a tight ra…

Catholic Church is Lucky it’s Just Same-Sex Marriage

By Marian Ronan

…es now include defined benefits for sex reassignment surgery, and the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers, have declared the denial of such benefits discriminatory. And intersex conditions are likely to increase, since some of them, at least, are related to the use of pesticides. It seems that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is already aware of—and opposed to—tra…

New Pope Accused of Conspiring in Kidnapping

By Nicole Greenfield

…Bergoglio noted disapprovingly in a 2007 speech. Meanwhile, an astounding number of women in Argentina, women without access to or education about contraception, die annually as victims of botched abortion procedures carried out in secret. If we do dig a little deeper into Bergoglio’s past, we find that he was accused of participating in one of the numerous human rights violations committed during Argentina’s Dirty War (which ended up resulting…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…Here is what Schumacher-Matos surmises: In 2009, a task force of the American Psychological Association came out clearly against trying to convert someone’s sexuality because of its harm and ineffectiveness; we are who we are and homosexuality is not something to “treat”. But at the same time, they acknowledged that acting on same-sex attractions is not appealing to all who have them. The task force supported “identity therapy” for some religious…

How the Study of Evangelicalism Has Blinded Us to the Problems in Evangelical Culture

By Christopher D. Cantwell

…included. Yet the internal consistency of this scholarly debate over what can and can not be properly understood as evangelicalism quickly breaks down in the newer pieces that comprise Parts II and III of the text. Reprints of recent articles, blog posts, and editorials join several commissioned essays in documenting the many ways that today’s evangelicals have failed to comport themselves with classical definitions of their faith. Historian Mich…

New Poll Reveals That Anti-Trans Rhetoric isn’t Just Affecting Republicans and White Evangelicals

By Chrissy Stroop

…vitable misgendering tantrums lobbed at Jenner by her fellow White evangelicals, Americans were learning about trans people, and that encouraged me as a trans woman who had yet to come out. I felt like acceptance was just around the corner. How quickly times change. Things went downhill fast when Donald Trump became president and prioritized the Christian Right’s policy goals, including attacks on the rights of transgender Americans. And even now…

The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

By Yannick Marshall

…s of the colony despite promising to uphold newly-won civil rights for African Americans as part of the “Compromise.” Thus the lie that “we aren’t racist” proved useful in the furtherance of the white nationalist cause and anti-Black violence as far back as 1877. Men, who only a decade earlier wore the uniform of the Confederacy to fight to preserve the traditional power relationship between white men’s boots and Black necks, removed their steel-g…